Pentagon strikes deals with top AI companies

Anthropic, which the US Department of War designated a “supply-chain risk” earlier this year, was not part of the agreement

The Pentagon has said that it has reached deals with major artificial intelligence firms to integrate their advanced AI capabilities into the agency’s classified networks.

The US Department of War has been actively negotiating with the industry’s leaders since the start of the year as it is trying to expand the application of AI in military operations and diversify the range of companies that provide the technology.

It is going ahead with the push despite concerns among experts regarding the ability of the AI to reliably operate within the existing laws of war and its possible use to invade the privacy of civilians in peacetime.

Agreements have been struck with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle to deploy their AI systems for “lawful operational use,” the Pentagon said in a statement on Friday.

Artificial intelligence will be integrated into the Department of War’s Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 networks to “streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the statement read.

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The US Department of War’s official AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million personnel in the last five months, “generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents,” it said. According to the Pentagon, the technology has allowed the execution of certain tasks to be sped up “from months to days.”

Notably, the statement excluded another major AI startup, Anthropic, which had a falling out with the Pentagon earlier this year after it refused to loosen safeguards for its technology. The company argued that its AI could be used for domestic surveillance or the deployment of automatic weapons without human oversight.

The Department of War responded by designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” a rare label typically reserved for entities linked to Washington’s foreign adversaries, effectively sidelining the firm from any future contracts.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth branded Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic” during a US Senate hearing earlier this week. Hegseth compared the company’s reluctance to agree to Pentagon’s terms to “Boeing giving us airplanes and telling us who we can shoot at.”

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Anthropic is currently challenging the Pentagon in court to have the “supply-chain risk” label dropped.